Post Classlead Discussion (Dec 2013)

Khizan

Another classlead round, another thread to discuss more changes that we want to make.

Raksha Band: Still bullshit, still needs fixed. I think there are two changes I will push for next time:

1. Change it so that you cannot set the band inside of an organization you are enemied to.
2. Becomes a channeled action when used inside an organization you're enemied to. 

These changes are to limit the "I can't die, so I can raid non-stop without losing anything" and the "I can get back in any time I want unless you have guards and traps over this specific room that's anywhere in the city that I please" abilities that the band currently possesses. I'd like more changes, but these are the ones I think stand a change of getting passed at this time.

Prismatic Barrier: Here's team combat lately. You hit the target, you hit the target, haha, barrier. Switch targets, hit the target, hit the target, haha, barrier. Repeat ad nauseum. If you don't have 100% CC uptime, this is basically impossible to prevent, and AM has the only truly reliable way to break a barrier. We need more ways to break barrier. 

Demoncalm: There is no longer a need for specific anti-demon skills of this type. The classes with demonic pets are balanced around getting to use them, and the main effect of this is just to add ~5.5 seconds to every doppleganger attack against AM as I summon it back, banish it, resummon it, repeat. Dopplegangers have <300 health and they can be crit on top of that. There is no need for a specific skill to peace them.

Flare: Runeguards couldn't get elemental damage etchings, because it might be "too powerful" with Sowulu. Similarly, Deathknights are limited to passive Soulquench procs, which must be manually activated and lasts a very short time. Why is it that Templars get: 

1. Flare: heavy damage burst active
2. Cleansing: moderate damage burst active -or- raze
3. Emblazon: Passive damage on DSL, which is always on without activation requirements.
4. Condemnation: Passive damage rite

It's cool when a Templar uses a minimal setup 250+ damage on-demand blast combo but overpowered for anybody else? Hell, Templars had the biggest no-prep single-target burst in the game already and this round of classleads gave them more.

Mark Return: You shouldn't be allowed to set these in enemy organizations. Getting back into a city should require more than "mark return"

Menoch

Is this the ragequit thread? I must've gotten lost on my way to the 4v6.

Ahkan

As a reasonable explanation to mark return. Wormholes, a legitimate comparison to marks, decay over time out of affinity. Maybe something like this could be designed? The better option is no marks, no permanent wormholes in competing affinity. Easy peasy.

Also, while Menoch was flailing around in DK, he whined about everything on that list. He's just emotionally compromised now because Juran hurt his feelings.

Juran

It is somewhat premature for me to judge the balance of this past round of classleads - a lot of things are still new and we're still fleshing them out. Things like prismatic barrier and the obelisk resurrection are irritating to be sure, but I'm going to need more time finding solutions before I decide that there are none.

That said, any concerns I have with the balance of the game right now are more macro-oriented than skill focused. Proper targeting matters less when your primary target is back before you kill your tertiary, which is less of a classlead issue than a core mechanics one. It would be nice to take some of the attrition back out of combat.

Lionas

Ahkan said:

As a reasonable explanation to mark return. Wormholes, a legitimate comparison to marks, decay over time out of affinity. Maybe something like this could be designed? The better option is no marks, no permanent wormholes in competing affinity. Easy peasy.

Wormholes are also harder to place.

I'd rather see marks still available in enemy territory, but for them to be removed on death.

Menoch

Almost correct, @Kabal. When I complained about these selfsame problems, foremost among them demoncalm as summoner, and flare as dk, and raksha as someone who enjoys 1v1'ing guys with too many artifacts, I was told they aren't really big problems. But selective remembrance seems to be a recurring theme.

Juran

Lionas said:

Ahkan said:

As a reasonable explanation to mark return. Wormholes, a legitimate comparison to marks, decay over time out of affinity. Maybe something like this could be designed? The better option is no marks, no permanent wormholes in competing affinity. Easy peasy.

Wormholes are also harder to place.

I'd rather see marks still available in enemy territory, but for them to be removed on death.

One of the most espoused solutions to mark return is 'destroy the room its in and rebuild it'. People used to say the same thing about wormholes, which is one of the reasons that wormholes were intentionally rebalanced during the Assassin beta.

That is somewhat a silly response.

Lionas

Juran said:

Lionas said:

Ahkan said:

As a reasonable explanation to mark return. Wormholes, a legitimate comparison to marks, decay over time out of affinity. Maybe something like this could be designed? The better option is no marks, no permanent wormholes in competing affinity. Easy peasy.

Wormholes are also harder to place.

I'd rather see marks still available in enemy territory, but for them to be removed on death.

One of the most espoused solutions to mark return is 'destroy the room its in and rebuild it'. People used to say the same thing about wormholes, which is one of the reasons that wormholes were intentionally rebalanced during the Assassin beta.

That is somewhat a silly response.

Having a reliable way to remove them without destroying the room (that being: Kill the person (either personally or with guards)) solves that.

They should also be stripped on logout (meant to post that, forgot to post that.)

EDIT: And when you switch professions

EDIT 2: And if it hasn't been changed, make mark return always move you to the ground, rather than to the elevation from which you track.

Bathan

I've only been back a few days, and while I enjoy the action the death changes encourage, it is kind of nuts when playing against the team with Aryana, especially if they're getting the bodies. That said, the way I see it, my team could've done a better job getting corpses tonight. That's something we can work on. As the death system goes though, I think it's just too much. I don't like the idea that my team can be ahead in kills in a specific teamfight and still lose, solely because people are getting back in 10 to 15 seconds. At that point, it's less a 'how do we win' and more of a test of survival match which, while cool, kind of discourages some people from participating. 

I made the comment earlier, and I think it stands. It feels like we've had vanilla Imperian for the past nine years with regards to death. The underworld was clunky, we had XP losses, very few people wanted to be involved. In like, the past two months, we've gone from vanilla Imperian to Mists of Pandaria Imperian. NO MORE UNDERWORLD. NO MORE XP LOSS. EVERYONE'S INVOLVED. There's got to be a way to take the good aspects of this experiment from bad and combine them to make something more serviceable. 

Juran

I love the idea of the new death system, I just feel the delay from dying should be long enough to decide a fight while you're not there. Team resurrections and proper targeting order -should- make a difference, but they don't because people get back too quickly.

I love the pacing of the new fights, I love the balance of the teams as they exist right now, and basically without exception I love the balance of team combat between the circles right now. I'm just grappling with problems that are bigger than just winning a team fight, and I'm still figuring out how to approach them.

Khizan

In one of the fights(that we won) last night, we killed Brishi three times. That's insane.

Ahkan

Fair enough. I usually favor going too far in class leads because a lot of the time, the band aid class lead fix is actually worse than the original problem.

I don't have any real issues with specific skills yet. What I do have a problem with is consistency of the 'grand master plan.'

I dislike the concept of making Imperian more active heal, active defense based. This works in games like Aetolia because there is no 99% effective coding standard. There also hindering afflictions and offenses built around priority afflicting. These mechanics also work in games like league of legends because mana is a finite resource that my abilities will use more of than I can possibly regenerate. Imperian has none of these things. We're removing 'blocks' to defenses like paralysis (for good reason) but we're not filling the gap. There's nothing to stop an active defense. There is no penalty (cooldown) for active cool downs outside of eq (they're all relatively low). There is 0 penalty for mindlessly spamming active healing. The actually ideal situation is spamming them with no strategy but to keep spamming them. Even WoW figured this was a bad thing.

Biggest offenders here--> Priestess, Hands, Vigour. 

To make this worse, the distribution of active (and passive) healing is terribly inconsistent, if not incoherent. One of my favorite quotes from the beta is that "The soulstorm classlead is pending because malignists already have a passive heal and don't need another." So wait, why then do these classes get it?

-->Cleric --> rite of healing, seraph care

-->Templar --> rite of healing (at the time, mirroring)

I could make the case for bard, but effort.

 I applaud lowering the 'tank' of the game. This is awesome and necessary for an adequate baseline. Do you have any plans of toning back the damage (globally) that was designed to deal damage in the age of tank? As a follow up to that, Templar is one of the tankiest classes in the game. In the beta they were referred to as fragile, which is simply not the case. What are we using as benchmarks of tank? High con? Damage reduction? Regeneration? What metrics are you using? What's with predators, why are they so mind numbingly tanky with 2-3 types of health support?

Yes, we want active healing and active defense. That's awesome. Why did you down vote generalize fitness, mm? If it's not in garrynbot, why is it an issue?

I want to know the answers to all of these questions so that I can better design my class leads to fit your end game. It would also allow me to give more insight as to other's class leads.

Mathiaus

It should've been a flat 75%-100% mallus when coming back from death quickly from the getgo, and building on the time, not the mallus, consecutively upon each death within a certain time. I feel the wait time to go back to combat is necessary, and to me at least the actual wait time never bothered me with old Dis, nor the near whole minute it takes to redef. This isn't CoD, we don't need near instant recovery.

Lionas

Ahkan said:

"The soulstorm classlead is pending because malignists already have a passive heal and don't need another." 

Doubly annoying, since we specifically included an alternate ability for malignist in the classlead.

Juran

Before Aryana, it used to take 3-4 minutes to get back from Dis if you didn't have to fight over coins. I don't at all mind the removal of coins, but that 3-4 minute gap was very important.

My tentative opinion with my current experience is that the solution to Aryana should have been normalizing it to be longer longer rather than make everyone able to get back just as quickly. We would still be fighting just as much, but a proper grasp on the flow of the fight would make a bigger difference to the outcome.

Khizan

If you had an anchor and used Nyrroth, death took you out of a fight for approximately 2 minutes, not 3-4

Khizan

Hands/Priestess/Vigour: These are way too spammable in the current combat metagame, and there's not enough control to really prevent it. These need a cooldown. 

Velion

Was thinking about a Shamanism ability that coincides with Runelore to the effect of old Runemaster, just a little less potent. The reason being that Wytch tanks like five day old wet paper. That might be fair, though, considering Wytch's massive offensive capability. Just a thought.

Sarrius

Khizan said:

Hands/Priestess/Vigour: These are way too spammable in the current combat metagame, and there's not enough control to really prevent it. These need a cooldown. 

I don't believe they need a cooldown, because if somebody is turtling with hands, you should have the sense to change targets and kill others instead. I see no reason why I'm not allowed to turtle against your larger numbers. There has to be something to even the field in situations where the team composition or team sizes are lopsided. Remember that people do these things at the expense of offense, hence active defense.

EDIT: Edit because THESE FORUMS ARE DOGSHIT, CAN WE PLEASE GET NEW ONES?

Ahkan

That's terrible logic and you should know better. Your entire team spams hands. What you just said is that you should play pk ring-around-the-rosey

You don't switch targets in LoL when someone starts actively healing, you ignite them.

You switch targets when someone else starts getting actively healed or ignite them.

You don't switch target off the carry because they get healed. Holy crap. 

You cannot indefinitely heal in any game, except Imperian. Actually, I got it. 

Vigour, hands, priestess should be a flat 20% mana expenditure. Done.

Kryss

If someone is spamming an active heal then good for them. Change targets. Or disable them. Or instant kill them. I'm sorry but I don't want to see combat devolve any further then it already has in terms of groups.

Juran

Kryss said:

If someone is spamming an active heal then good for them. Change targets. Or disable them. Or instant kill them. I'm sorry but I don't want to see combat devolve any further then it already has in terms of groups.

There should be better options to prevent someone from spamming heals, but if someone is getting away with it (because they aren't being properly disabled) you should have to either beat through it or switch targets.

The obvious concern is that so many of those disables do not exist anymore, so people are still reactively looking for solutions.

Juran

That said, Prismatic still needs either more conditional ways to prevent it or more active ways to strip it. The aura miracle is still basically the worst thing in the game.

Ahkan

That's a big motivator with active healing complaints. There's nothing that stops them. If you're going to remove what stops them and say "hurhur, reward skillful play"

perform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands meperform hands me

That's not skillful. My cat can and has done that. He also eats his own poo. If you're going to remove everything that "blocks" a skill, you need to slow that skill down or give it a notable cost (not essence/devotion).

Khizan

So when everybody has hands and can spam it, that's working as intended?  When you're fighting 1v1 or 2v2 and completely unable to make headway because I'm dropping priestess every few seconds, that's working as intended?

Septus

Dogs > cats.

Kryss

Combat should not be purely who can do the most damage. If you take a 2v2 and someone is spamming an active heal they are not attacking and thus should be easy for two people to kill with means that -aren't- damage. It's amazing how well you can afflict and setup with coordination. So yes, anyone can spam an active skill and in doing so they wield a double edged sword, provided their opponents are on the ball.

Septus

I don't really mind alternatives to damage being a viable option in groups, but that's a personal preference thing. Maybe I'm in the minority there.

Khizan

I don't mind damage alternatives being viable. They should always be viable. I mind them being the only thing that's viable, though, because you shouldn't have to be an affliction tracking hero to contribute meaningfully to fights.

The G-Bot was a great thing because it made fighting accessible to everybody, even those who didn't want to invest all that time and all that work into writing a full up combat-healer. Transferring the same coding burden back over to the offense would be a mistake.

Septus

How legitimate an issue is it though?

By that I mean, at what point is it impossible to damage someone out looping hands/priestess/vigour?

I'd not base anything off of someone like Eldreth for instance. Sarrius on the other hand I'm pretty sure two people could damage out pretty easily with him looping hands. I'd need to actually test though.

Kryss

There is a middle ground between affliction hero and dps hero. You don't need to be a combat pro to contribute in a meaningful way beyond just using your most damaging move on someone. Is it really a huge stretch to use a few toxins on a macro or two? To be able to sap and look at someone's mana? To be able to highlight a limb breaking? Just how dumbed down do we want it all to be.